Keywords

Introduction

In his 1989 interview with The Paris Review, William Trevor famously defined the short story as “the art of the glimpse”: “The short story should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more” (Stout 1989). A few years later, John McGahern, another master of the form, described the short story as “a fragment”: “A short story is like a flash that illuminates one point. What happened before that point and what happened afterwards can only be imagined” (Collinge and Vernadakis 2003). For Claire Keegan, similarly, the short story is “a discipline of omission”:

You are truly saying very little. People say very little anyway. We talk a great deal, of course, but we actually say very little to each other. I think the short story is a very fine place to explore that silence between people, and the loneliness between people and the love that is there. And I think they all come organically out of the short story. (Keegan 2009; cited in D’hoker 2016, 160)

For these writers, the short story is an art of silence. It is shaped by what remains unsaid as much as by what is said, often in an attempt to illuminate the unsayable. In formal terms, this reticence is bound up with the short story’s brevity, which is realised through omission and condensation, leaving the reader to imaginatively fill in the gaps. For Keegan, this formal reticence tallies with a thematic concern with silence, as the gaps in the story reflect what remains unspoken between its characters.

Critics too have often suggested that the short story’s laconic nature makes it the ideal form to stage the secrets, taboos and traumas that haunt people, families and communities, particularly in an Irish context. In “Strategies of Silence: Colonial Strains in Short Stories of the Troubles”, Ronan McDonald traces the many forms of silence in Northern Irish short stories—forms of “muteness or cuteness, inarticulacy or reticence”—and interprets these “both as a symptom of a colonial condition and as an aesthetic strategy seeking to resist this condition” (2005, 253). For McDonald then, the success of the Irish short story, as a form of “minor literature”, is intimately bound up with the Irish (post)colonial condition, as “[i]t can use its eccentricities and ellipsis [sic] to work against dominant discourse, to give voice to occluded narratives without simply reproducing the languages of authority” (250). In a discussion of McGahern’s Collected Stories (1992), Bertrand Cardin similarly traces a connection between the author’s manifold uses of silence and Ireland’s socio-political context. Recalling the banning of McGahern’s The Dark (1965) by the Irish Censorship Board, he notes that “[a]fter several centuries of colonization and catholicism [sic], Irish writers still had no freedom of speech, hence the prominent role of the implicit in their fiction” (Cardin 2003). Commentators of William Trevor’s short fiction too have often read the author’s insistent deployment of silence as coming out of his Irish background, whether as the result of the trauma of sectarian violence (Jeffers 2013), as the consequence of the (post-)colonial “culture of silence and suppression of guilty secrets” (Kennedy-Andrews 2013, 65), or as an expression of the way in which silence is “engrained in Irish nature”, as Robert E. Rhodes has suggested (cited in Goszczyńska 2020, 92).

It is certainly tempting to construct a causal link between the manifold forms of silence and silencing in modern Ireland, on the one hand, and the success, or even specific characteristics, of the modern Irish short story, on the other. Yet there are many good reasons to practise caution here. First, coincidence is not causality. This applies both to the relation between the short story’s formal techniques of reticence and its treatment of silence as a theme and to the connection between both of these and the socio-political context of its writers. Moreover, as several critics of Irish exceptionalism have noted, other European countries too have been marked by the systems of domination associated with secrecy and silencing, whether in the form of foreign rule, religious tyranny, sectarian violence or patriarchal oppression. Nor are the formal characteristics of omission, compression and selection unique properties of the Irish short story. They are generally recognised hallmarks of the modern short story, which was developed towards the end of the nineteenth century through the implementation of an aesthetics of brevity for short narrative texts. Under the adage “less is more”, modernist writers experimented with different ways of maximising effect through a limiting of means (Hunter 2007, 6–9; Zumthor 2016). Although George Moore and James Joyce were early enthusiasts of the modern short story’s foreshortening strategies, the mid-century masters of the Irish short story—Corkery, O’Connor, O’Faolain, O’Flaherty—were more cautious in applying these modernist techniques. The oral quality, even garrulousness, of their short fiction, its foregrounding of “the voice of a man speaking” (O’Connor 2004, 29), has often been construed as the lingering influence of the Irish storytelling tradition, itself an oft-quoted factor in the success of the Irish short story (Kiberd 1979, 14).

In short, in the face of the great variety of themes and forms of the Irish short story as well as the international social and aesthetic trends in which it necessarily participates, reading the Irish short story through the lens of silence needs to be done with considerable caution. In this chapter, therefore, I will map the different ways in which Irish writers have used the short story to explore forms of silence, while trying to avoid the twin traps of essentialism and exceptionalism. Taking my cue from some of the critics mentioned above, I aim to provide an overview of both the strategies of silence used in the modern short story and the different forms of silence—psychological, interpersonal, social, political and spiritual—that have been explored in short stories by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish writers. I will demonstrate the formal strategies of silence in the modern short story by means of Joyce’s Dubliners, as the many forms of silence in that collection have been well-documented in criticism (see e.g. Rabaté 1982; Wright 2003: Pearson 2005; Caneda-Cabrera 2018). The wide range of thematic treatments of silence, on the other hand, will be illustrated through some well-known short stories of such masters of the genre as Edna O’Brien, George Moore, William Trevor, Maeve Kelly and Claire Keegan.

Formal Strategies of Silence

In her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence”, Susan Sontag discusses modern art’s fascination with silence. With the modernist self-consciousness about art, she argues, came a longing for an anti-art, an art which undoes itself and in doing so approaches something more authentic, seeks to convey the ineffable. She traces this desire in avant-garde poetry, minimalist music and the prose of writers like Kafka, Beckett and Wittgenstein, who employ language to check language, to express the unsayable. Of course, that desire is paradoxical, she argues, since “if a work exists at all, its silence is only one element in it”, hence “the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence” (Sontag 2013, 10–11). Silence, in other words, is never absolute, but only “‘reticence’ stepped up to the nth degree” (32).

This drive towards reticence is also the central aesthetic principle of the modern short story, a genre which was developed during modernism and became the dominant model for short narrative prose in the twentieth century. In the modern short story, as Elizabeth Bowen already noted in her preface to the 1936 Faber Book of the Modern Short Story, shortness came to be recognised as a “positive”, enabling quality, rather than as the negative principle of “non-extension” that characterised the older tale tradition (Bowen 1950, 39). In other words, writers realised that it is possible to suggest more by saying less, to maximise the effect by minimising the means. As short story critic Valerie Shaw (1983) writes, “[t]he short-story’s success often lies in conveying a sense of unwritten, or even unwriteable things” (264). In this way, the modern short story is a prime example of what Sontag recognises as the “tendency” in modern art “toward less and less”, but with the less “ostentatiously advance[ing] itself as ‘more’” (14). Since shortness is the defining characteristic of the modern short story, its narrative and stylistic features are fundamentally shaped by the principles of brevity. The story employs various strategies of omission, compression and selection in order to achieve brevity and, in so doing, manages to imply rather than state meaning. The modern short story’s aesthetics of brevity is thus also an aesthetics of silence, with the formal techniques of brevity also gesturing towards silence as an aesthetic ideal.

In his article on McGahern’s short fiction, Bertrand Cardin distinguishes two techniques of silence in the modern short story: ellipsis and eclipse. The first refers to “a total omission of a word, a phrase or a name, whereas the term ‘eclipse’ tends to be used when mentioning a partial concealment, a sense of semidarkness, chiaroscuro, in short a failing message, which keeps an important component in the dark” (2003). “As a process of economy”, Cardin writes, “ellipsis is characteristic of the short story—a laconic literary genre (…) The story is based on the unsaid, on the ellipsis, on the monologue, on words which remain in abeyance, hushed, unspoken or unheard”. Thus, the modern short story typically leaves out context and background. It starts in medias res and ends abruptly, just before the conclusion is reached. Another form of temporal ellipsis are the story’s frequent gaps in chronology, as sections of the plot are being suppressed and only acknowledged—if at all—through white spaces in the text. For Suzanne Ferguson, such “elliptical plots”, in which “expected elements of the plot” are omitted, constitute “the hallmark of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth short story” (1994, 221). Joyce’s “Eveline”, for instance, does not open with the death of Eveline’s mother or her meeting with Frank, but rather with Eveline sitting at the window on the day of her planned departure. Her backstory, what Ferguson calls the story’s “hypothetical plot” (221–2), has to be pieced together on the basis of her half-articulated memories and thoughts. Later on, Eveline’s movement from the window of her father’s house to the North Quay where she will take the boat is strategically omitted in order to heighten the feeling of stasis and entrapment. In other stories from Dubliners, the plot similarly revolves around elements that are withheld or kept secret, whether from the characters, the reader or both. Think of how Father Cotter’s problem or misdeed goes unmentioned in “The Sisters”, how the outcome of Mrs Mooney’s talk with Doran is not revealed at the end of “The Boarding House”, or how Maria in “Clay” is not told of her mistake when she sings the second stanza of the aria from The Bohemian Girl twice. Another form of narrative ellipsis often found in the short story is that of suppressing some crucial piece of information until the end of the short story. The cause of Gretta’s melancholy sadness on hearing The Lass of Aughrim, for example, is deliberately omitted first, then gradually hinted at, only to be revealed in the closing pages of the story.

Next to these temporal and narrative forms of ellipsis, the modern short story typically elides words or phrases as well. Characters often go without names in short stories, as is the case in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, where we only find out who is speaking when a character addresses them. Other verbal ellipses abound in Dubliners, which has become famous for its abstemious prose, its style of “scrupulous meanness”. David Wright counts no less than 150 instances of ellipsis in the strict sense in Dubliners, i.e. where actual dots mark omission in speech or thought (2003, 151). Sometimes, Wright notes, these elusions “involve some degree of sexual euphemism or dramatization of social awkwardness and distance, notably in ‘A Little Cloud,’ or evasiveness about political or religious realities, in ‘Ivy Day’ and ‘Grace,’ or an evasion of the reality of death, in ‘The Sisters’” (152). Overall, he argues, both narrative and verbal gaps in Dubliners are expressive of “forms of loss” and “forms of Dublin deprivation” (156). M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera similarly notes how “[p]auses in speech, fragmented utterances, incomplete sentences, absences of words and gaps indicate the degree to which the unspoken, the inarticulable, silence itself is tied to a fair representation of Dublin public and private life” (2018, 93). At the same time, of course, ellipsis as a form of “stylistic economy” also characterises the stories of Hemingway, Chekhov and Woolf and is part and parcel of the modern short story’s impressionist aesthetics and modern worldview more in general (Ferguson 1994, 222).

A second strategy of silence outlined by Cardin is that of eclipse. Although related to the omission of verbal or narrative elements, eclipse refers more to the way these absences are partially revealed or hinted at through suggestion and implication. A narrative example of eclipse is the partial obscuring that accompanies the perspectival mode of narration that can often be found in the modern short story, whether in the mode of a highly subjective first-person narrative or a third-person character narration. In Dubliners, the latter is often constructed through the use of free indirect discourse which, as Hunter argues, is itself “a kind of ‘scrupulous meanness’, in that it again involves the suppression of a determinate, mediating point-of-view in the narrative discourse” (57). Yet eclipse is also present in the modern short story’s frequent use of symbols which invite the reader to establish meaningful connections, but also inevitably frustrate that process (Head 1992, 30–33). Or, as Woolf puts it, words can be used to express not “one simple statement but a thousand possibilities” (cited in Hunter, 56).

To the two strategies of silence identified by Cardin, I would like to add that of the epiphany. A well-known hallmark of the modern short story, the moment of heightened understanding or quiet revelation often functions as the climax of the short story, as a new insight given to the character, the reader or both. Joyce’s most famous epiphany doubtlessly occurs at the end of “The Dead”, where the reader comes to share Gabriel’s understanding of his own limitations and those of life in general. In many other Dubliners stories, however, the story’s crucial moment serves to crystallise the character to the reader, without providing illumination to the character. The epiphany’s association with silence is threefold. First, the epiphany is tied to a character in isolation, who achieves this moment of heightened understanding in a context of silence—think of the snow silently falling in “The Dead”. Second, the precise content of the understanding is never expressed directly in the epiphany: it is purposefully omitted, only gestured at through symbols and vague intimations. Third, with the epiphany, or “moment of being” as Woolf (1978, 70) called it, the modern short story often realises precisely that “enriching emptiness”, or “resonating or eloquent silence” which Sontag (11) considers an essential ingredient of the modern aesthetics of silence.

In Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art (2017), Steven L. Bindeman distinguishes between two forms of silence: disruptive silence and healing silence. Disruptive silence, he argues, has to do with breaks and limitations, with sudden halts in linearity. It occurs when “the limits of a particular discursive frame are bumped against” (3). Healing silence, on the other hand, is “experienced in terms of heightened levels of emotional and spiritual intensity”, which can provide a brief moment of unity and oneness of the world (3). The ellipses and eclipses encountered in the modern short story are arguably examples of disruptive silence: they tear apart the fabric of the story, bring about ruptures and gaps, generate uncertainty and ambiguity, which challenge—and defy—the reader’s attempts of making sense. The epiphany, by contrast, often provides a brief but timeless moment of healing silence, which allows the character and/or the reader to “break (…) through beyond language” (3). Yet Bindeman also acknowledges that this breaking through the limits of language is not just “in contrast to”, but also “dependent on” “the breaking down of language by disruptive silence” (3). In a similar way, the different strategies of silence outlined here go hand in hand in the modern short story. While they are a corollary of the short story’s poetics of brevity—on the principle that less is more—they are also expressive of a more fundamental aesthetics of silence, as an attempt to go beyond words in communicating the unsayable. For both of these strategies, the modern short story demands the cooperation of the reader, even as the story’s “recalcitrance” (Wright 1989) also destabilises the reader’s ability to trace the hidden figure in the carpet and fill in the gaps.

Themes of Silence in Irish Short Fiction

If silence in Irish short stories is part and parcel of the generic and aesthetic characteristics of the modern short story, in Irish short fiction these formal patterns of silence often resonate with the exploration of silence as an aspect of plot and theme. In critical analyses of the uses of silence in Irish fiction, silence is mostly seen in a negative light: as the result of personal or social trauma, as the consequence of tyranny or oppression or as the impossibility of expressing what society censures as taboo. In interpersonal relations too, silence is often construed as the corollary of secrets, of what must remain hidden in a family or community. Nevertheless, in recent short stories in particular, silence also often figures as a positive element, whether as a mark of respect for others or an ideal of communion that bypasses speech. In what follows I will provide examples for each of these six thematic forms of silence—trauma, tyranny, taboo, secret, respect and communion—before in a final part zooming in on some recent stories by Claire Keegan so as to show how these themes of silence are often intertwined, reflecting the ambivalent value of silence in contemporary Irish society.

The association between trauma and silence is well-established in psychotherapy and trauma studies. In Irish literature, silence has been linked to such national traumas as the famine or the civil war, which have long been suppressed in history and memory. In her analysis of late nineteenth-century regional short fiction about the famine, Marguérite Corporaal reads generic conventions of condensation, acceleration and ellipsis as “play[ing] a significant role in repressing the horrors of hunger as well as, paradoxically, in transferring the severe local trauma of this turbulent era to transnational audiences” (2015, 23). Trauma can be of a personal nature as well, as in Edna O’Brien’s “A Scandalous Woman” (2003), where Eily literally stops talking after an unwanted pregnancy forces her to marry the man who all but raped her: “Eily was silence itself (…) even to her mother she refused to speak, and when asked a question she bared her teeth like one of the dogs” (256). O’Brien’s famous last line, “our was indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women” (265), moves from this single instance of silencing to the silence of women under patriarchy more in general.

Eily’s personal trauma is therefore connected to the larger patriarchal structures of oppression, which are also a recurrent source of silence and silencing in Irish short fiction. In fact, reversing the silencing of women under patriarchy has been one of the dominant trends of Irish women’s fiction since the 1970s. Although short fiction as a rule lends itself less well to historical topics, the rewriting projects of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Pale Gold of Alaska (2003), Emma Donoghue’s The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) and Martina Devlin’s Truth and Dare (2018), effectively give voice to historical women silenced in fiction and fact (D’hoker 2016). Maeve Kelly’s stories about the oppression of women in rural communities of 1980s Ireland similarly draw attention to the close ties between submission and silence. In “Orange Horses” (1991), for instance, domestic abuse seems an accepted part of the traveller community, where anything a woman does can be taken as insubordination. In the face of such oppression, the women counsel each other secrecy and silence: “Her sisters had always given her plenty of advice. Don’t get too fat or you won’t be able to run away when he wants to bate you. (…) Keep half of the money for yourself. Her mother gave her one piece of advice. Keep silent and never show a man the contempt you feel for him. It is like spitting in the face of God” (34–5). Elsie learns “her mother’s secret of silence” (36) and keeps a stash of money buried under her caravan. When the caravan burns down and the bodies of Elsie and her daughter are not found, it is up to the reader to decide whether they have escaped or finally succumbed to repression. As McDonald notes about silence in a postcolonial context, an “imposed muteness” is in Kelly’s story “transformed into cunning reticence” as silence becomes a strategy of resistance (251). Moreover, in making Elsie the focaliser of this story, Kelly gives her a voice, thereby critiquing the patriarchal tyranny that seeks to suppress her. As Simon Workman observes, “Kelly’s fictional treatment of domestic abuse, one of the most nefarious issues facing Irish women, displays her most radical attempt to articulate an emancipatory perspective within a narrative world that exposes a virulently oppressive state and society” (2019, 312). In this way, Workman argues (313), Kelly’s short fiction is at one with her work for the Limerick Refuge for Battered Wives and with her contribution to the government report about domestic abuse, aptly entitled Breaking the Silence (1992).

The project of breaking the silence resulting from structures of oppression, exclusion and disempowerment has received quite some attention in Irish studies, from postcolonial as well as feminist perspectives. As Maria Beville and Sara Dybris McQuaid claim, “in terms of understanding Irish culture and society, it is invaluable to realise the profound implications of silence for narratives of history and identity” (2012, 3), whereby silence can be both an aspect of muteness, when one is not allowed to speak, and one of cuteness, of deciding not to speak. McDonald’s reading of short stories about the Troubles similarly points out how the story’s narrative strategies of “silence and refraction”—ellipsis and eclipse—dovetail with the “difficulties of articulation, expression and communication in a fraught and fractured political context” (258). In the short stories of Mary Beckett, he continues, “a patriarchal dimension to the persecution and muteness of the heroines profitably complicates a one-dimensional understanding of political oppression in terms of sectarian supremacy” (258).

Especially in its feminist dimensions, the project of giving voice to the marginalised and suppressed often involves addressing topics which patriarchal society has long outlawed as taboo. One could think of the female desire and sexuality treated in the stories of Edna O’Brien, the lesbian love represented in Mary Dorcey’s A Noise from the Woodshed (1989), the conflicted experience of motherhood dramatised in several of Anne Enright’s stories or the still controversial topics of abortion, gender change and body-shaming tackled in Lucy Caldwell’s Multitudes (2016) and Intimacies (2021). While the social taboos addressed in Irish short fiction do not differ from those treated in longer fiction, strategies of eclipse and ellipsis characteristic of the modern short story facilitate the oblique but powerful treatment of these taboo topics. In her discussion of Irish short stories which tackle the taboo of old age, for instance, Heather Ingman notes that “[t]he short story form lends itself particularly well to the subject of ageing” (2018, 125). She singles out in particular the short story’s use of epiphany, “moments when middle-aged characters become aware of time passing”, and of subjective, ecliptic narration to validate the inner consciousness of the demented, thereby countering “society’s tendency to write off [their] inner world (...) as of no importance” (147, 22).

The modern short story’s elliptical form is also well-suited to staging the ramifications of secrets in interpersonal relations. While these secrets may be related to larger social silences of trauma, taboo and tyranny, in many stories their force is particularly felt in the smaller settings of a marriage, family or small community. Thus, secrets and silences mark the dysfunctional marriages explored in Maeve Brennan’s Dublin stories as well as the sibling relations in Mary Lavin’s Grimes stories (D’hoker 2013, 2016, 69–7). Silence as the inability to communicate between mother and daughter is also powerfully explored in Edna O’Brien’s “A Rose in the Heart of New York” (2003), where the visit of Rose’s mother to New York fails to result in a reconciliation and rekindling of their old affection. Her mother’s death, soon after the visit, leaves Rose with a silence even more devastating than before:

She wanted something, some communiqué. But there was no such thing. A new wall had arisen, stronger and sturdier than before. Their life together and all those exchanges were like so many spilt feelings, and she looked to see some sign or hear some murmur. Instead, a silence filled the room, and there was a vaster silence beyond, as if the house itself had died or had been carefully put down to sleep. (404)

A sustained engagement with the insidious nature of secrets characterises William Trevor’s stories (Clark 2001). Marta Goszczyńska links Trevor’s preoccupation with secrets to such formal characteristics of his fiction as “discontinuities (including shifts in point of view, prolepses and analepses) and silences that riddle his texts, many of which are explicitly signalled through graphic means: blanks between paragraphs and ubiquitous asterisks” (100). Paul Delaney notes similarly, “[n]ot only is silence a crucial component in the narrative technique of Cheating at Canasta, it also feeds into the subject matter of the text, as secrets are frequently kept and characters choose not to talk or are silenced” (2013, 191).

In Trevor’s posthumous collection, Last Stories (2018), secrets and silences again abound between the characters. In “Two Women”, a boarding girl unwillingly learns the truth about her biological mother; “An Idyll in Winter” tells the story of an adulterous affair; in “The Crippled Man”, a woman keeps the death of her crippled cousin a secret in order to preserve his pension; and in “The Piano Teacher’s Pupil”, a boy silently steals a small object of his teacher every time he comes for a lesson. Yet, in several of these posthumous stories, silence is connoted positively: a character’s remaining silent is seen as a mark of respect, sympathy or tribute to another person. The two Eastern European painters who witness the woman’s act of deceit in “The Crippled Man”, for instance, are repeatedly described as “not saying anything”, “not speaking”, working “in silence” (2018, 10–12). Their reticence, which exceeds their limited knowledge of English, makes the woman’s secret safe with them: “they did not say this was a grave, or remark on how the rank grass, in a wide straight path from the gate, had been crushed and recovered” (32). It is a form of respect for the woman, whose “history was not theirs to know, even though they were now part of it themselves” (33).

Silence as reticence also pervades “The Piano Teacher’s Pupil”. The teacher knows her most gifted pupil is stealing things, but she keeps silent about it; just as the boy himself is always silent, safe for the beautiful music he plays for her. The teacher’s unease about this betrayal is resolved, however, in an epiphany at the end of the story when she accepts the mystery of the other as of a kind with the mystery of music and life itself:

Long afterwards, the boy came back—coarse, taller, rougher in ungainly adolescence. He did not come to return her property, but walked straight in and sat down and played for her. The mystery there was in the music was in his smile when he finished, while he waited for her approval. And looking at him, Miss Nightingale realized what she had not before: that mystery was a marvel in itself. She had no rights in this. She had sought too much in trying to understand how human frailty connected with love or with the beauty the gifted brought. There was a balance struck: it was enough. (2018, 9)

This positive sense of silence, as a mark of respect for another person, a form of openness to alterity, has also been commented on by Beville and McQuaid, who refer to Luce Irigaray’s observation: “the first word we have to speak to each other is our capacity or acceptance of being silent (…) silence is the word, or the speaking, of the threshold—a space of possible meeting, of possible hospitality to one another” (cited in Beville and McQuaid, 2).

The larger sense of mystery evoked in the closing moment of “The Piano Teacher’s Pupil” is also connected to the formal strategy of the epiphany, with its long tradition of “healing silences” (Bindeman, 3). For, as Woolf’s term “moment of being” suggests, the moment of (epistemological) illumination is often accompanied, sometimes superseded, by an immersive, ontological experience (D’hoker 2008, 64–65). In Irish short fiction too, many epiphanies consist of a moment of silent communion with nature, other people, the world, even God. The closing epiphany of “The Dead” readily comes to mind, but George Moore’s “Homesickness” (1902) provides an even earlier example. Its ending evokes James Bryden’s “silent life” as consisting of “the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue lines of wandering hills” (Moore 2000, 31). If in Moore’s story this ideal of a silent, spiritual communion with the ancestral land in Ireland is always already lost, in more recent short fiction, it resurfaces in a more positive way in moments of communion with nature. In Claire Louise Bennett’s “Morning, Noon and Night” (2015) for instance, the character’s self-sought silence and isolation becomes a means of coming closer to nature. In brief epiphanic moments, the silence can even give way to a kind of transcendence:

I would listen to a small beetle skirting the hairline across my forehead. I would listen to a spider coming through the grass towards the blanket. I’d listen to a squabbling pair of blue tits see-sawing behind me. I’d listen to the woodpigeon’s wings whack through the middle branches of an ivy-clad beech tree and the starlings on the wires overhead, and the seagulls and swifts much higher still. And each sound was a rung that took me further upwards, and in this way it was possible for me to get up really high, to climb up past the clouds towards a bird-like exuberance. (31–32)

In other contemporary Irish short stories too, silence seems to take on more positive overtones than allowed for by the “breaking the silence” paradigm, which has tended to dominate in Irish studies. The result is a more nuanced and ambivalent notion of silence, which I will explore a little further in the final section of this chapter, by looking at the different forms of silence in Claire Keegan’s short stories.

The Ambivalence of Silence in Claire Keegan’s Fiction

At the heart of “Walk the Blue Fields” (2007), the title story of Keegan’s second collection, is a secret: the past affair between a priest and a young woman, Kate Lawlor, who is now being married to another man. This secret forms a narrative ellipsis in the first part of the story, which describes the church wedding and the wedding dinner. Although the reader is given access to the priest’s thoughts, the truth of the affair is deliberately omitted. Only through a gradual accumulation of veiled hints, such as the lateness of the bride at the ceremony, her ripped veil and broken string of pearls, her trembling and silence, does the story convey that something may be amiss. Yet the bride’s perspective is purposefully elided: her feelings about the marriage remain a blank space in the story. That the secret may well be a public one in the small village is suggested by the barbed looks and remarks of some of the wedding guests, about how “the white cloth is aisy stained” (26).

In the second part of the story, the priest leaves the “terrible music” of the party behind and goes on a walk in the “still” evening (31). Only in the solitude of his walk do his thoughts return to the affair, to his love for Kate and to their final weekend at “The Silent Valley”, where he told her that he would not leave the priesthood. The priest’s evening walk leads him to the caravan of the “Chinaman” near the river, whom the villagers consult for various ailments. The priest and Chinaman hardly speak (like the painters in Trevor’s “The Crippled Man”, the Chinaman has little English) but the massage the man gives him does bring a form of release. Moreover, by his quiet and content self-sufficiency, the Chinaman sets the priest an example—“Here is a man living happily in a clean place on his own. A man who believes in what he does and takes pleasure in his work”—thereby disproving Kate’s theory that “self-knowledge lay at the far side of speech” and that “a man could not know himself and live alone” (37). After leaving the Chinaman in the “blue night”, the priest’s silent contemplation of the fields around him—“He stands there and looks at the world” (38)—leads to the closing epiphany:

Where is God? He has asked, and tonight God is answering back. All around the air is sharp with the tang of wild currant bushes. A lamb climbs out of a deep sleep and walks across the blue field. Overhead, the stars have rolled into place God is nature. He remembers lying naked with Lawlor’s daughter in a bed outside of Newry town. (…) He remembers these things, in full, and feels no shame. How strange it is to be alive. (38)

Even though “God is answering back”, he does so without sound, only through smell and sight. The images and memories evoke a mode of being that is beyond rational thought, beyond words: a silent communion with nature and with another person which the priest gives spiritual significance. It gives him courage to continue his life “as a priest, deciphering, as best as he can, the Roman languages of the trees” (38).

Secrets are also at the heart of the Deegan family in “The Forester’s Daughter”, the longest story of Walk the Blue Fields (2007). The first secret concerns the adulterous affair of Martha Deegan with a travelling salesman which resulted in the third Deegan child, the daughter of the title. This affair is itself a reflection of Martha’s unacknowledged unhappiness in her marriage and on her husband’s ancestral farm: “Martha realised she had made a mistake (…) she craved intimacy and the type of conversation that would surpass misunderstanding” (55). Her husband Victor, who has “occasional doubts about his daughter” (51), adds to this deeply buried secret a deception of his own which sets the story in motion: the dog he gifts his daughter on her twelfth birthday is but a run-away dog which he found in the woods. When the dog’s first owner comes to claim him, the daughter is utterly devastated: “By the time a week has passed, she has stopped talking” (75). Martha compounds her daughter’s traumatised silence, with her own angry one: “his wife no longer speaks to him, no longer sleeps at his side” (76). Like Elsie in Maeve Kelly’s “Orange Horses”, she is secretly hoarding money in order to run away. Unable to leave her children, however, she decides on another form of revenge: to spill the beans on her own secret, not just to Victor but in front of the prying neighbours, whose social sanction Victor craves.

Breaking the silence, however, does not bring forgiveness or relief: “A lid of silence comes down on the Deegan household. Now that so much has been said, there is nothing left to say. The neighbours stay away these times. Deegan gives up going to mass” (87). Relief only comes in the form of a cleansing fire at the end of the story, when the dog returns and the middle Deegan child, “a simpleton”, sets fire to the wooden toy farm he has built. The fire also quickly engulfs the real farm into flames. Outside on the brightly lit lane, the family stands watching the fire in silence. “They stand there until the heat becomes too strong and they have to back away”, much like the cows, who “have come down to the fence to watch, to warm themselves” (89). Both animals and humans are “ghastly figures” who yet “seem half comic in the firelight” (90). Past dissension seems momentarily forgotten as the Deegan family stands united, at a remove from the prying neighbours who are “gathering” “at the foot of the lane”, “coming on slowly towards them” (90).

Since “The Forester’s Daughter” covers the story of a marriage in a few dozen pages, the narration is necessarily laconic. Through condensation and ellipsis, crucial events are foregrounded, recurring habits and fixed patterns are implied and the reader is invited to fill in the rest. The multiple shifting focalisation used in the story also works to alternatingly illumine different aspects of the plot. Apart from Victor and Martha, the two most important narrative perspectives are those of the simpleton and the dog. These stand out precisely because of their respective silences. Both rarely speak, but witness and know. The boy has long been privy to his mother’s secret and the dog, called Judge, is exceptionally clever. Voicing his thoughts, the narrator notes:

Judge is glad he cannot speak. He has never understood the human compulsion for conversation: people, when they speak, say useless things that seldom if ever improve their lives. Their words make them sad. Why can’t they stop talking and embrace each other? (65)

Echoing Keegan’s remark, quoted at the start of this chapter, that people “talk a great deal”, but “actually say very little to each other”, this observation seems to underscore again the value of silence in human interaction. As in the figure of the Chinaman in “Walk the Blue Fields”, silence as a mark of self-reliance is also found in the youthful Martha, who enjoyed the silent walks on the beach during their courtship: “She strolled along, stooping eery now and then to pick up shells. Martha was the type of woman who is content in her body but slow to speak. Deegan mistook her silence for modesty and, before a year of courtship ended, he proposed” (52). Martha’s silence is not the silence of the mute (or cute) wife, so often depicted in Irish fiction. Hers is the silence of self-containment and self-confidence, of not caring “what the neighbours think” (63, 64).

A similar emphasis on the value of silent self-confidence in the face of prying neighbours can be found in Keegan’s long short story, Foster (2010). The story is told by a young girl who goes to spend the summer with relatives of her mother, a childless middle-aged couple on a neat and thriving Wexford farm. Although Mrs Kinsella tells her on her first evening, “[t]here are no secrets in this house” (20), halfway through the story a neighbour gleefully reveals that the clothes she wore to mass are those of the Kinsella’s dead son, who drowned while trying to rescue their dog from the slurry tank. Unlike in “The Forester’s Daughter” or many a Trevor story, this is not a secret between the couple, but rather an insistence on the privacy of their grief, a shielding from prurient neighbours. Explaining this to the girl on a long walk on the beach, Kinsella tells her: “You don’t ever have to say anything (...). Always remember that that is a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing” (64–5). The ending of the story sees the girl apply this counsel when, on her return home, she does not tell her mother that she fell into the well: “Nothing happened. This is my mother I am speaking to but I have learned enough, grown enough, to know that what happened is not something I need ever mention. It is my perfect opportunity to say nothing” (86). Her silence shows both her loyalty to the kind Kinsella and her own, new-found self-confidence.

Conclusion

In all three of Keegan’s stories, in short, secrets function as narrative ellipses that structure the plot. As in most modern short stories, they are accompanied by temporal ellipses, which foreground crucial scenes and omit others, as well as by verbal ellipses as many things remain unsaid, to be hinted at by resonant silences and suggestive symbols. In thematic terms, however, secrets and silences receive ambivalent connotations in the stories. While the secrets are clearly linked to social taboos—adulterous affairs, a priest’s sexuality, a child’s accidental death—keeping silent about them is not as nefarious as in the stories of O’Brien, Trevor or McGahern. In fact, in the face of the curious and gossiping neighbours that figure prominently in the small villages of all three stories, silence is deemed necessary if one wishes to preserve one’s privacy and independence. In several of the characters, therefore, silence is connoted positively as a mark of self-determination and self-confidence. It is also a sign of being at one with one’s body and natural surroundings. It is coincidence that, in all three stories, characters are at their most happy on walks near the sea or in the countryside. A closeness and openness to nature is also the context for the epiphanic moments in the stories, moments of silent and healing communion with other beings and the world at large, which cannot adequately be captured in words.

In “The Aesthetics of Silence”, Sontag notes that “as the prestige of language fails, that of silence rises” (21). Given the information and communication overload of contemporary society, it is not surprising that authors turn to a renewed exploration of silence: the silence of what remains unspoken in the midst of speech, but also the silence of what is unsayable. Although the project of breaking the silence remains important as writers articulate trauma and taboo or give voice to victims of tyranny, contemporary short fiction also values silence as a form of respect, privacy and—given the increased awareness of ecological destruction—communion with the non-vocal natural world around us. With its long tradition of using silence as a means to express more than words can say, the short story seems well-placed to explore these different modes of being, which shimmer as resonating silences or tantalising glimpses at the far side of speech.